In an interview with The Economist’s Globalization Editor Matthew Bishop, Thiel listed a number of industries in which he sees too much regulation.

First, he homed in on the pharmaceutical industry, claiming that the regulation from the Food and Drug Administration made it too difficult for new drugs to be approved. “You would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today,” Thiel said.

He agreed that the safety tests required by the government are a good idea, in theory. But he argued that they are too stringent and that pharmaceutical companies should be able to sell drugs that are inferior to the best one on the market.

For example, the most effective drug for disease X may cost $10 per pill. But consumers should have the option to buy a drug that is 90% as effective for $1 per pill, he said. People should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to pay more for a slightly better product, just like in other industries.

“You never develop drugs that are slightly worse, but much cheaper,” he said of the current environment.

When asked about one major change he’d make to the federal government, Thiel said it would be to reform of the FDA — though he did stop short of saying it should be completely abolished.

But that wasn’t the only area of the public sector he had scorn for. Not even close.

About his own history, Thiel said that the current financial regulatory environment may make it impossible for him today to build digital payment service PayPal, the company he co-founded in 1998 and eventually made him a multi-millionaire. When asked about the possibility of digital currency Bitcoin challenging traditional government currencies, Thiel talked about the inherent advantages of government-issued money.

“If you don’t have [US dollars] to pay your taxes, people with guns will come after you,” he said. Ultimately, dollars are “backed up by U.S. military power,” he said.

The New York City audience seemed to mostly enjoy the discussion. But there were some audible murmurs at a few of his provocative statements.

When asked about cybersecurity and privacy laws, Thiel described the American security apparatus as “hoovering up all the data in the world,” a reference to N.S.A. surveillance. But he said that officials have no idea how to use it.

“It’s The Keystone Cops rather than Big Brother,” he said.

And it wasn’t just current Big Government ideas Thiel went after. He talked about past leaders whose philosophies conflicted with his libertarian world-view.

“I’m not a fan of FDR,” he said. “I’m not a fan of the New Deal.” He explained the recovery from the Great Depression as a result of technological innovation. The government policies at the time had little to do with it, at least by his account.

Founders Fund joins $75 million investment in cannabis company

Let’s make one thing clear: Brendan Kennedy, co-founder of cannabis company Privateer Holdings, does not like images of pot leaves. Branding-wise, he believes the marijuana industry is its own worst enemy.

“Everything is named ‘canna-something’ or ‘mari-something,’ with a green and black logo and pot leaves,” he says. Cannabis will be a mainstream product, he insists, but it has to lose the cheesy subculture clichés first.

That explains why Kennedy looks at home wearing a grey suit (no tie) in the downtown Manhattan headquarters of Privateer’s newest subsidiary, Marley Natural. The room is indistinguishable from the office of any other startup, with exposed brick walls and rows of uncluttered West Elm tables. I suppose I expected beaded curtains and five-foot bongs, but the only evidence that the space is occupied by a marijuana seller is a single portrait of Bob Marley, the company’s namesake, in the entryway.

Today the company moves one step closer to legitimacy, securing a large round of institutional funding, a first for the industry.

Founders Fund, the investment firm created by Peter Thiel, has joined a Series B round of funding worth $75 million for Privateer Holdings. More than $50 million of the round has closed so far, including a $15 million convertible note from February of last year. The entire round will officially close in a few weeks, Kennedy says. Founder’s Fund has not disclosed the exact amount of its investment beyond “multi-millions” of dollars.

The funding from Founder’s Fund is a significant milestone for Privateer, which, in addition to Marley Natural, operates Tilray, a mail-order service for medical marijuana in Canada, and Leafly, a sort of Yelp for dispensaries. Large investment firms have been wary to do business with marijuana companies, even in states like Colorado where the drug is legal, because it remains illegal in the eyes of the federal government.

When Privateer Holdings got its start in 2011, Kennedy pitched 500 investors over the course of two years. It was a struggle to scrape together a $7 million Series A round of funding from high net worth individuals and family offices. Four years later, investors are more open-minded. The first investor Kennedy ever met, who passed on the deal in 2010, decided to joined Privateer’s Series B.

Founders Fund, an early investor in Facebook FB, Airbnb, and SpaceX, became comfortable making a marijuana investment after a year and a half of diligence on Privateer, partner Geoff Lewis says. When he first became interested in the category, he realized how few real opportunities there were. The entrepreneurs fell into two categories, he says: either they’ve been in the industry for a long time, which means they were operating illegally at some point, or they have a gold rush mentality, looking to make a quick buck. Privateer impressed him with the way it navigated the complex legal environment, and the fact that it delivered everything Kennedy has said it would.

Both Tilray, which has 100 employees and shipped 35,000 packages last year, and Leafly, which has four million monthly unique visitors, expect to turn a profit in 2015. But those companies serve medicinal marijuana customers; Marley Natural is Privateer’s entree into recreational use. Kennedy is keenly aware that the branding of legal recreational cannabis will have an impact on how mainstream his industry becomes. Partnering with the family of Bob Marley was “such an obvious move,” he says. The announcement alone garnered two billion media impressions, and the attention allowed Marley Natural to recruit talent and form new partnerships. Not to mention the instant brand recognition. “It takes time to build a brand,” Kennedy says. “We skipped five to ten years with that announcement.”

With today’s announcement, Privateer becomes the most well-funded company in a burgeoning industry predicted to be worth $35 billion. With the addition of a brand name institutional investor like Founders Fund, Kennedy is hoping his toughest customers—banks and investors—will take notice.

My dad always used to tell me that the difference between the “you” now and the “you” 20 years from now will be the places you visit and the people you meet. I would also add baldness and gray hair to that, but they don’t sound as cool.

He was right. Whether you meet someone in person or read a book he or she authors, people are pivot points that enable learning and foster personal growth for others.

Since January marks the rush for New Year’s resolutions and personal “pivots,” below are eight books every entrepreneur should read in 2015:

1. The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups From Their Founding Entrepreneurs by David Kidder

The title says it all. If you’re looking for a wide array of lessons learned and entrepreneurial experiences, this book is for you. Sharing insights from 41 different founders, The Startup Playbook covers everything from leadership lessons to finding one’s niche.

2. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull

This book is a must read for any business leader, not just the entrepreneur. It is filled with valuable insights about what creates, drives and sustains an innovative culture and compels a company to attempt what no other company has done. Remarkable lessons that only a CEO would know.

3. True North by Bill George and Peter Sims

This is a great book to discover your personal leadership vision, values and motivations. The authors surveyed 125 men and women on what they believe makes them authentic leaders, and the answers may surprise you. Also of note is the personal leadership development portfolio handbook that accompanies the book, which is a personal guide to help you develop your authentic leadership.

4. Zero to One: Notes Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

The following excerpt sums up the concept of Theil’s book: “Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1.”

This bestseller is geared specifically towards the startup community as it offers invaluable advice on what to consider and what to avoid before moving forward. Additionally, the author offers his philosophy on business, which helps the reader generate new ideas he or she may not have considered previously.

5. ThinkerToys by Michael Michalko

The ability to create is just that — a developable ability — that can be learned and improved upon much like any other competency, and the author does just that in this creativity “bible.” After all, creativity and opportunity are what emboldens wannabe startup founders to take the plunge into the world of debt known as entrepreneurship. ThinkerToys, and its companion Thinkpad: A Brainstorming Card Deck, offers 33 different exercises and 56 cards that will spark your creativity and inspire the innovation monster within.

6. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

There’s a reason why this book is number one on Amazon and a Hollywood motion picture. While entrepreneurism isn’t quite the theme of this book, the lessons of personal sacrifice, survival and resiliency are. After reading this book your perspective on founding a startup may change because if the main character, Louie Zamperini, overcame the challenges and catastrophes he faced, then so can you.

7. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by Gen. (Ret.) Stan McChrystal, Chris Fussel, Tantum Collins, and David Silverman

As head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Gen. (Ret.) Stan McChrystal faced an enemy that was constantly changing before his very eyes. In a world of both complicated and complex challenges, how do you stay ahead of the power curve while the world and competition change? This book explains how.

8. Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

While this book is completely visionary, it raises questions and concerns about current industrial and societal trends and where they will lead in the future. From a startup perspective, the global challenges the authors envision also serve as business opportunities. Of note, the authors have a second book entitled Bold coming out in February 2015 that will “teach today’s entrepreneurs the tools, technologies and mindsets they will need to make ‘it’ happen.”

Every book has some takeaway that can be applied towards any endeavor. What were your favorite books and lessons from 2014?

Meet the 27-year-old inventor backed by Bill Gates and Peter Thiel

Scientist Danielle Fong, 27, has been running her company LightSail Energy for six years and has yet to bring a product to market. In fairness, she is trying to create something that has never been built before—something that could revamp the power grid.

LightSail’s aim is to compress air to create heat and then use that to power, well, just about anything that needs it. This energy would be cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels and would allow renewables sources, like wind and solar, to be stored for later use. To harness the energy, LightSail injects a mist of water spray into the air, which absorbs the heat energy, and allows it to be stored in a shipping container system or underground caverns. The stored energy could then be pumped back into the grid when demand is high at a lower cost to users.

In her corner, Fong has Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, and Peter Thiel, all of whom have invested in LightSail as the Berkeley, Calif. company has grown to 55 employees. Two other companies, SustainX (which is largely backed by GE Energy Financial Services) and General Compression, are also developing energy compression storage technology to try and tap into a potentially trillion-dollar market.

Fortune spoke with Fong about her invention.

Fortune: At age 19, you could have been doing any number of things, from attending college to joining a tech company. What made you decide to rethink how energy is delivered on the power grid?

I always worried about it. In early 2005, when I was deciding whether to go to graduate school, I thought about the biggest challenges we face in the coming decades and energy is right up there. I went Princeton to study energy, but I wasn’t quite sure the method we were choosing was correct. I would ask: Since renewable energy costs have come down dramatically, why can’t we just use that? In the nuclear fusion program people said that we don’t have the economical capability to store the energy and, because of this, we have to do nuclear fusion. I thought energy storage is much simpler than harnessing nuclear fusion.

Why didn’t you finish your Ph.D program?

I noticed that my most brilliant professors worked extremely hard all the time to raise money and they would raise very small amounts—maybe less than $1 million a year for the highest-ranking professors. At the time, Facebook had just raised money at a $15 billion valuation, which was more than [the funding for] the entire nuclear fusion program. I thought it seemed easier to do a startup of Facebook’s scale, sell it, and then invest that money in energy research rather than hoping that the government will fund the right people. I left school and moved to Silicon Valley.

How did LightSail come to be?

The idea for LightSail came from a question I was asked: How far can an automobile get if you have a garage roof covered in solar panels? Is there even enough energy to power the every day American commute? I wanted to know the answer, and I found out pretty quickly that, with the standard automobile, you wouldn’t get far enough. You could go farther with really fancy batteries, but they degrade quickly and aren’t economical. Then I thought about using compressed air because it could be really cheap. I thought I could write a paper and open source the idea, but then I realized no one was going to read it and then implement it. I had to start a company.

How did you team up with LightSail’s co-founder and CEO, physicist Steve Crane?

I was working for a software company that Steve was helping out with, and he and I had become friends and had talked about doing a compressed air-powered vehicle. I had only worked at the software company for a week when he asked me what I really wanted to do, and I told him I wanted to start LightSail. He said he’d help me, and he initially funded it and joined full time.

In 2010, LightSail took its concept to the U.S. Department of Energy seeking a grant. What did they say?

They were all over the place. One group said it was impossible and another group there said it would meet all of the program objectives, but that since people had already done compressed air energy storage, that removing the requirement for fuel wasn’t a breakthrough. The next time we went back to them, they told us this concept had already been done. Then the time after that, they asked us to speak at their conference as an example of a huge success in energy. We still haven’t found a good way to work with the DOE. They are very happy with our progress, even though they’ve never given us any money.

In 2009, LightSail received $15 million in funding from Khosla Ventures. How did you get that investment?

Steve knew an entrepreneur in the Valley, who passed us to one of Vinod’s partners, who liked the idea. We were presenting a vehicle at the time, and he asked what if we took the power train and applied it to the electric grid’s problem? We hadn’t done the deep analysis at that point, so we came back two weeks later with a business plan and Vinod was there that time. He was very excited, although it took a lot of due diligence to close the investment.

LightSail has since raised at least another $25 million, according to CrunchBase, including from Bill Gates and Peter Thiel. What happens when you have a different opinion than them about the business?

While we are creating this energy storage system, we’ve also made the world’s lowest cost pressure vessel, and we can sell that into another market and scale it up a little faster to reach profitability faster. Peter Thiel thought most companies succeed much better if they just focus [on one concept], a model that has worked very well in software. But I brought up the point that in energy one of the biggest successes ever was Standard Oil, which figured out how to refine oil in addition to actually getting it, transporting it and storing it. When they refined oil, instead of selling the one part that everybody liked, they figured out products that they could make out of the waste like candles. Peter Thiel took this to heart and, in his next class, mentioned that people should consider vertical integration rather than being focused on a single thing. In some ways it was a nerve-wracking discussion [with Peter], but it improves the quality of thinking at the company.

It’s been six years since you started the company. When will LigthSail bring a product to market?

We’re about a year from being commercial on our pressure vessels. We’re about one year away from piloting our energy storage and two years from being commercial on it.

Who are your customers for the energy storage units?

A good example is a large hotel chain. They have many hotels on islands. There is good sun and wind, but high electricity costs from diesel. Without storage, they cannot move off of diesel. But with storage, if it is cheap enough, we can sell them energy whenever they need it, at a lower cost than fossil fuel based energy. You can imagine it powering every hotel, resort, and even entire cities, energy islands, powered this way.

What challenges are there in incorporating LightSail’s technology into the existing power infrastructure?

It’s relatively simple to interconnect. It’s no more difficult for us to interconnect on the demand side, than it is for diesel generators to connect. On the supply side, it’s the same. We use the interface from diesel generators, so we connect to the grid the same way.

How receptive have utility companies been?

Utilities see any new technology as risky and they are very risk-averse. You need to prove your technology before they will take it on.

You’re 27 and your first and only career job has been running your own company. What have you learned about managing people?

The biggest thing is that managing people isn’t about ordering them to do a bunch of stuff. It’s about lighting a fire. And it’s not just about doing that with your own employees. Every time you sell your product or are trying to get an investment or are talking to someone outside your company, you’re trying to light their fire. It’s to the point where I’ve had employees tell me I am messing up their company—that’s what you want. They felt so much ownership that, at times where I was not able to give my all, they would be concerned for the mission. You don’t want people to just do what they’re told.

We know what Edison and Tesla did, but tell us about a lesser-known person, like what you learned from Paul MacCready inventing the human-powered aircraft?

A lot of groups were much better funded and had a lot of money and did things the standard way—you figure stuff out, you design it, you calculate it and you get everything ready for one big test. And then you crash, basically. This is also what happened with the competitors of the Wright brothers—they were all very top-down. They had an idea, kept going and executed, and hopefully it would work. But it rarely did. What Paul MacCready and the Wright brothers did was figure out how to make an aircraft that you could actually fly and that you could rebuild really quickly, so that you can learn faster.

There is a big lesson for this. You have to think about how you are learning as a system. You just can’t assume that by doing something it will work or that effort is correlated with learning. You have to figure out how you are getting information and incorporating that back into what you are doing and what things you are missing and how you could make a better design, and then show that. Paul MacCready figured out how to make an airframe that you could make in a day, and that allowed him to go through dozens of iterations and finally they figured out something you can fly. Then they improved it to the point where it was possible for a pretty fit cyclist to fly across the English Channel.

15 fabulous Fortune reads from 2014

Every year, Fortune publishes hundreds of magazine stories and thousands more online. Winnowing down the best is impossible and, for that matter, totally subjective. But we’ve tried to pick out a few from among the most compelling. They take you from the Vatican bank to a “Club Fed” prison, and from inside the struggling McDonald’s fast-food empire to the chaos at Sony Pictures after hackers breached its computer systems. It is just a sampling of what Fortune’s team does everyday. Stay tuned for much more in 2015.

“You shouldn’t get your bearings from breaking things, but rather from creating them,” the well-known venture capitalist and recent author told a packed auditorium at University of California at Berkeley Wednesday night.

A good forty minutes into his talk, Thiel, a co-founder of online payment service PayPal and early Facebook investor, was disrupted: protestors stormed the stage and shut down the event.

Thiel was invited to discuss development in the developed world by the Berkeley Forum, a non-partisan student group that brings speakers to campus. The evening, the product of nearly two months of work, was to be divided into four parts: a speech by Thiel, an interview by a student moderator, questions from specially selected audience members, and a final audience Q&A, capped off with his signing his recent book, Zero to One. His appearance just happened to coincide with an uptick in Berkeley’s famous political activism following the recent grand jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo. and New York related to police killings involving African-Americans.

During the first half of his speech, Thiel discussed the importance of monopolies and iconoclasm. A noted libertarian, he once wrote that freedom and democracy are incompatible. A good monopoly is one that innovates and creates new things, he pointed out, saying his advice was for entrepreneurs to pick small markets where they wouldn’t face much competition. Google is a monopoly when it comes to search, he explained. They just don’t talk about it.

Thiel also mentioned that society resists innovation. “There’s a strange phenomenon in Silicon Valley where most of the people who start companies suffer from mild Asperger’s,” he said. “That’s a critique of our society, not of them.” Anyone with interesting ideas will be talked out of them, while investors are socialized to invest in what sounds familiar, rather than in ideas that could be game-changing.

Anyone who copies Facebook or Google is missing the point, he said, because Facebook and Google were game changers. To succeed, entrepreneurs have to do something that’s radically different from the status quo.

“Trends are overrated,” he said. “If you hear big data or the cloud, run away, it’s a fraud. A buzzword tells you someone is undifferentiated in a category.”

As he spoke, a slow rumbling from protestors could be heard in the background. From time to time it was loud enough to drown him out.

“That’s so Berkeley,” Thiel said, while the audience laughed.

There was less laughter when one of the organizers asked for help barricading the doors because protestors were trying to enter. Members of the audience rushed up the aisles to assist.

When everyone was seated again, Thiel continued accompanied by the rumble of protesters screaming outside and a steady pounding against the doors. Soon after, the organizer told the audience she could no longer guarantee their safety and asked what they wanted to do (they voted to continue). A student moderator asked Thiel how he felt about the tradeoffs between political activism, which can provoke change but also impacts productivity.

“Political activism makes people angry,” Thiel said.

At that point, almost on cue, an audience member stood up and yelled, “F—you.” The doors of auditorium burst open and a flood of protestors waving signs spilled across the auditorium and chanted “No NSA” before switching to “Black lives matter.”

The audience, indignant about the interruption, surged to its feet and chanted “go home,” and “Peter Thiel matters.” For a few moments there was a screaming stand-off as the protestors and audience members faced each other.

Thiel was escorted off of the stage and organizers relayed the obvious: The event was canceled. A protestor apologized to organizers – sort of – before leaving.

“I’m sorry but we had to shut it down to get media attention,” the protester said.

Afterwards, organizers and attendees gathered in small clumps to voice their outrage. “It was unproductive for the protestors and it was unproductive for us,” said Serena Gupta a math and computer science major at Berkeley. “They should have started a dialogue. Thiel would have been open to questions, he stayed on stage until they were in his face.”

Parthiv Mohan, a cognitive science and computer science major, said: “The protestors chanted as if we thought black lives didn’t matter. For all they know we could have been out protesting with them last night.”

(Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of U.C. Berkeley student. He is Parthiv Mohan, not Parthir)

Peter Thiel’s very negative – and very useful – advice for entrepreneurs

Maybe you can tell something about the Zeitgeist of the business world by looking at what business people are reading at airports. In the white-collar recession angst of the early 1990s, for example, they were desperately flipping through the cost-cutting manifesto Reengineering The Corporation. During the China panic a decade ago, it was Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. When the financial crisis exploded in 2008, and blew their neat little spreadsheets to smithereens, they turned to Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, about the power of the unpredictable, to find out why.

Today, the Nasdaq is surging, young companies such as Facebook and Twitter and Uber and AirBnB are turning established industries upside down, and a new generation of dot-com wannabes are dreaming of starting their own revolution. So Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Peter Thiel has probably picked the perfect moment to publish Zero To One: Notes On Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Thiel has a remarkable track record. He co-launched PayPal and sold it to eBay for billions. Then, as a venture capitalist, he was among the early backers of Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, and Yelp. It says something about Thiel’s clout that the marketing materials for the book have come with gushing reviews from Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Nassim Taleb, and even GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

Okay, so you’re a young dot-com wannabe in San Francisco—or New York, or London, or Taipei—thinking of jumping on the bandwagon and launching your own venture. Your company will be the next Uber or Square or so on. What advice does Thiel have for you?

Lots. Some of it is buried, or revealed in passing. And upon looking back through Zero To One I realized most of the really interesting advice is negative. Don’t.

Don’t have part-time employees (“Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.”) Don’t pay your CEO too much and don’t pay staff lots of cash instead of stock.

Don’t have a board of more than three to five people. Don’t offer incremental advances. Don’t bother launching a new technology unless it is “an order of magnitude” or “10X” better than what exists today.

Don’t play little ball—swing for home runs. Don’t listen to the mainstream. Don’t be afraid of the unknown. Don’t try to be a big fish in a big pond before you’ve been a big fish in a small pond. Don’t start a company with people you don’t really like. Don’t neglect sales and marketing.

And, my favorite bit of advice: Do not, under any circumstances, create a complex or confused organization. “The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal,” Thiel writes, “was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.”

This, of course, is applicable to people in any organization or business whatsoever, in the old economy as well as the new. I am constantly astonished at how many big companies are so badly organized and how few follow sensible management techniques. Maybe if more established companies adopted a little more of the thinking of successful startups, there would be fewer successful startups.

Meet OLX, the biggest Web company you’ve never heard of

Alec Oxenford isn’t a recognizable name in American business circles, but in South America, he’s a CEO rock star of sorts. At least, that’s what I’m inclined to believe, after experiencing the Alec Oxenford effect firsthand during a recent coffee meeting in New York.

Partway through our meeting, a student in a hoodie approached our table and excitedly said, “Sorry to interrupt, but are you Alec Oxenford?”

The student, who was Brazilian, professed his admiration for Oxenford. He was a hopeful entrepreneur himself, studying at Columbia University. He said he recognized Oxenford from his Instagram account. Oxenford was embarrassed—he swore up and down that it wasn’t a set-up to impress me. His public relations person said that sort of thing happens fairly frequently in Argentina, where Oxenford is based.

I had little choice but to believe him. Oxenford’s classifieds company, OLX, has quickly become a household name in emerging markets. This fall, OLX reached a milestone that puts it in the same category of Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat: 200 million monthly active users.

Founded in 2006, the company has grown to 1,200 employees and operates in 40 countries. With 11 billion page views, 25 million listings, and 8.5 million transactions per month, it is the largest marketplace in India, Poland, and, as of last year, Brazil. Funded by U.S. venture firms including Bessemer Ventures and General Catalyst Partners, OLX sold a majority stake to the African conglomerate Naspers in 2010. OLX is free to use and makes money selling promoted listings to users. (Payments are conducted offline, which has allowed OLX to avoid dealing with legacy payment infrastructure in each market it enters.)

But OLX’s success is not the reason for Oxenford’s status among South American entrepreneurs. (Though his co-founder and co-CEO, Fabrice Grinda, who left in 2012, is also well known in American tech startup circles as an angel investor.) Rather, Oxenford’s notoriety comes from his commanding personality—he will dominate a conversation—and staunch contrarianism, a point of view he shares with Peter Thiel, who has invested in OLX through his venture firm, Founders Fund.

For example, OLX has taken the “Martian approach” to international expansion. Where most companies launch in their home countries because that’s what they understand best, OLX started with the biggest available market: India. The company didn’t launch anything in its home country, Argentina, until four and a half years later. American founders are “self-centered” for only focusing on the U.S. and developed markets, Oxenford says.

“It’s rational to believe you know local markets,” he says, “but people are always the same in each country. They think the same way. They have different priorities, but they all want to progress in life and that’s what drives Internet behavior.” He believes OLX helps people progress in life by acting as a “wealth creator” in emerging markets, where users can easily monetize their possessions by selling them to each other.

Oxenford’s other big contrarian play is to invest heavily in television advertising. Many successful startups don’t worry about marketing until their growth has hit a plateau, relying on cultural relevance, momentum, and public relations outreach in the early days. Startups that poured money into TV ads in the dot-com era concluded they didn’t work. That characterization has stuck. Oxenford says this is a mistake because there were so few Internet users in the dot-com era. Now, almost three billion people are online, many of whom skipped desktop Internet and went straight to mobile. Television ads directing them to a website or app actually work, he says.

OLX was profitable three years ago, but was only growing by 70% to 80% each year. Citing the potential for competition, Oxenford decided that slow, organic growth was actually more risky than fast-paced, advertising-fueled growth. “If people had understood what we were doing before, we would have had a lot more competition,” he says. So OLX sold itself to Naspers to fund faster, less profitable growth with TV advertising.

Now, the company is in a position of strength in many of its markets, and its biggest three—India, Brazil and Poland—only make up 50% of user base. As Craigslist and eBay’s EBAY lasting success have shown, it’s hard to disrupt a marketplace once it has liquidity. Which highlights another one of Oxenford’s contrarian decisions: he has no desire to compete in the U.S. or other developed countries. There’s too much opportunity elsewhere.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is often known for his ability to understand what makes a company successful and for having some contrarian points of view. Following the sale of PayPal to eBay EBAY in 2002, Thiel founded global hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, technology company Palantir and venture capital firm Founders Fund, which has invested in companies like Spotify, Oculus and SpaceX. Thiel was also Facebook’s first outside investor and currently sits on its board. Through his Thiel Foundation, four years ago, he created the Thiel Fellowship for up-and-coming entrepreneurs under 20, who are each given $100,000 and two years to eschew higher education and work on a venture of their choosing.

Known for his strong opinions about hot-button topics like education, company culture and competition, Thiel has been in the news of late promoting his new book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, which he co-wrote with former student Blake Masters, and was based upon the notes that Masters took while taking Thiel’s computer science course at Stanford. The authors aim to rebuff the notion that innovation is dead and instead delve into how entrepreneurs can explore new technologies and create fresh inventions in current fields and “uncharted frontiers.” We caught up with Thiel to talk about the value of being naïve and finding inspiration off the beaten track.

Q: Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently when you were first starting up? How did you learn this lesson?A: When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me — from high school to college to law school to professional life. When I was working at a New York law firm, that path came to a dead end. All the aspiring lawyers on the outside wanted to get in but all of the people I worked with wanted to get out. It was like Alcatraz but all you had to do to escape was walk through the front door. So I left. And that experience helped me realize how many things in the world might be possible and valuable, yet ignored by most people, simply because they are not found on any conventional track.

Q: What do you think would have happened if you had had this knowledge then?A: If I’d realized how arbitrary it was, I might have gotten off the track a lot sooner. I know I would have thought about it more carefully. But there’s no way to run the experiment twice.

Q: How do you think young entrepreneurs might benefit from this insight? A: An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role. Because of that uncertainty, there’s always a temptation to reach out for some kind of guide, whether it’s old business school case studies, or, more likely, the most recent moves of the firms that you perceive to be competitors. Reacting to them can at least give some idea of what to do. We’re so used to competing on tracks that entrepreneurs can quickly get caught up in incremental battles with each other, almost without realizing it. But defining yourself by a competitor means giving up the most important reason to be an entrepreneur: You can do something new in the world that won’t be done unless you are the one to do it.

Q: Besides inventing a time machine, how might they realize this wisdom sooner?A: I don’t know. How to teach people to do what hasn’t been done is a great riddle. It’s because schools tend to breed a kind of process-oriented conformity that I started a fellowship for young people who want to learn by getting something done in the real world — precisely so they can begin charting their own path as early as possible.

I taught a class at Stanford for the same reason — because I wanted to tell students that they don’t have to accept the paths laid down by their schooling or by their competitors. But fundamentally it’s something people have to figure out for themselves.

Q: What are you glad you didn’t know then that you know now? A: If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That’s why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done. And it turned out to be true: PayPal worked. But if I’d had more experience, I’m sure I would have shied away from the risk and done something much more boring. This is one of the reasons that young people can have a strange advantage in technology in that they haven’t yet been brainwashed into thinking that current methods are inevitable.

Q: What is your best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?A: The most important thing is simple: Start with a small market and dominate that first. Big markets are tempting because they seem full of opportunity but most of that opportunity will be for others to compete with you. Instead focus your ambition on a definitively superior solution to a specific problem.

Peter Thiel: Peak oil lives!

Peter Thiel, whom we profiled in September in the cover story “Peter Thiel Disagrees With You,”is the founder of two billion-dollar companies (PayPal EBAY and Palantir), a venture capitalist (his flagship Founders Fund now manages $2 billion in assets), a hedge fund manager, the first outside investor in Facebook FB, and the author of the recently released book about launching startups, Zero to One.

When his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, launched in 2002, Thiel followed a peak-oil thesis, which paid off splendidly as oil prices rose from about $40 to $140. But prices fell off a cliff in 2008, the fund got clobbered, and institutional investors fled. He licked his wounds and soldiered on. We decided to ask him how he’s faring and what he’s thinking now that crude oil prices have fallen from about about $105 in June into the low-$80 range today.

Fortune: How has Clarium Capital fared during this period? Did you expect this, or are you taking a hit?

Thiel: Generally, we’ve not been long oil the last few years. I think this is a point, though, where I would start to be somewhat bullish on oil equities. I don’t think the price can go down much more.

With prices in the $80 range, has the peak-oil thesis been thoroughly discredited? Aren’t we facing a glut?

From the vantage point of 2002, it is the case that oil prices are still quite high. In 2002, the long-term oil prices were expected to be around $25-30 a barrel, reflecting the expectation that prices would revert to the pre-9/11 crisis levels. We’re now at $80 a barrel. So it certainly is higher than people would have thought at the time. If you had said back then, “Well, there’s going to be a huge fracking revolution,” that’s been offset by all these increases in global demand, especially from China.

More narrowly, from 2011 to 2014, after oil spiked to around $110 during the Arab Spring and then held around there, the move back to the $80-85 range is a very welcome relief. It’s being driven in part by supply increases in the U.S. and then there’s also this relentless decline in demand. In part, because the economic recovery is slow. But then the good part is that there is this steady tightening of CAFE standards in the U.S. [The federally enacted Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations currently require manufacturers to achieve an average fuel efficiency of 54.5 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025.]

Are we benefitting from that already?

I don’t have the exact numbers but U.S. oil consumption has come down a lot since 2005-2006. [It dropped from about 21 million barrels a day in 2005 to 19 million in 2013.] That’s a combination of the recession—fewer people are working, people are driving less—but also we’ve shifted back to smaller cars. Hummers are out of fashion. I think the CAFE standards are one of the very understated things going on relentlessly beneath the surface and will keep going for 15 more years. Cars here are still much bigger than in Europe or Japan or rest of the developed world.

You always think of conservation as not the greatest form of innovation—ideally, you’d like completely new sources of energy—but there’s actually a lot we can do on the conservation side.

So you have the CAFE standards, the ongoing fracking revolution, and that’s buying us a fair amount of time. On the other hand, I’d be surprised if oil can get much lower than $80 a barrel because the cost of fracking is pretty high.

Fracking technology always gets cast as this technological improvement. I think it’s in some sense inferior to past oil extraction technologies, because it’s dirtier and more expensive. It’s sort of a stopgap. I always want to push back on its being framed as this technological panacea.

I think we’re still in the sort of in-between zone, where the fundamental technological problem [of finding new, sustainable energy sources] has not been solved, but we have more time than we would have thought.